Dark Tales of Bucktown: Neighborhood Secrets and Legends Audio Tour

Bucktown has a knack for keeping secrets - and most of them are deeply unsettling. On this walking tour, you'll hear the true stories behind the neighborhood's murders, hauntings, and disappearances. You'll also encounter a real-life fugitive, the ghost of a pub owner who still tends bar, and a creature with wings and red eyes spotted across Chicago.

The tour starts at the corner of Wolcott and Wabansia Avenue, in front of the former Lincoln Tavern, where a 1980 robbery ended in multiple murders - and one unlikely survival. You'll walk along Wolcott Avenue past the Bloomingdale Trail overpass, where a 12-year-old boy named Otto Scholk was killed by a train in 1902 and where residents still report signs of his presence. You'll also pass St. Mary of the Angels, a Romanesque church run by the secretive Opus Dei - the only one they operate in the entire country.

Along the way, you'll hear how the Hard Hat Robbers met their end in a hail of police bullets, how a killer confessed his darkest secret over drinks the night before skipping town, and how a woman dubbed the Black Widow of Bucktown vanished before her trial – and was eventually found living in Hawaii under a name borrowed from two fashion designers. The tour ends at Club Lucky, an Italian restaurant where three bullet holes still visible in the bar mark the spot where a Polish immigrant named Walter met his unfortunate end in January 1967.

On this 40-minute tour, you'll have a chance to:

• Learn how photographer Richard Nickel died salvaging pieces of the Chicago Stock Exchange building
• Visit the site of the Bucktown Pub, haunted by its former owner Wally, a cantankerous man who shot himself upstairs
• Discover where the 1986 film Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer - so disturbing it created the NC-17 rating - was partly filmed
• Hear how a killer arrested for littering in Los Angeles was extradited back to Chicago to face justice
• Hear about 150+ sightings of the Chicago Bat, a winged creature with red eyes seen across the city

If you've ever wondered what really goes on behind closed doors in one of Chicago's most storied neighborhoods, this tour will tell you. Sweet dreams.